Why Suicide Prevention is Important to Me

Note :: This was originally handwritten on 10th September 2012, but wasn't transcribed until the 11th of September.

WARNING :: Potentially triggery discussion of depression, suicide, and suicide ideation. Please do not read if you don't have the spoons to do so.

Today is World Suicide Prevention Day and the first day of National Suicide Prevention Week.

Suicide prevention is important to me because no one should have t feel like they have no other alternatives than to die.  The reason behind that desire is irrelevant in the face of its existence.  Everyone has worth, everyone is important, everyone is necessary.  I have wanted to feel that way all my life.  Some days are better than others.  Some days the scars, physical and emotional, are so painful as to be overwhelming.  But every morning where I wake up is a success because I didn't give in to the darkness the day before.  Every day I am here, I am stronger.  End of story.

Over the years I have developed coping mechanisms, in place of therapy, including my writing and varying levels of St John's Wort.  Several different rounds of journaling have helped, but not always.  A lot of the poetry and fiction I've written over the years has been incredibly cathartic and my free alternative to therapy.  My latest "obsession" with the character of Regina from Once Upon a Time has brought a lot of these issues of mine to the surface in the last year.  The portrayal of this character by Lana Parrilla has touched something deep within me.  This character is not just the stereotypical bad guy.  Parrilla plays her with a vulnerability and a pain that speaks far too deeply into my own  issues and such, particularly in the episode, "The Stable Boy".  I see aspects of my own pain, fear, and struggle in Regina, and it just punctuates so much of what I've gone through.

Today -- this week -- is very poignant and bittersweet for me.  Suicidal thoughts and depression were a longtime constant in my life.  I knew it started not long after my parents' divorce when I was 10 years old.  I've learned recently that it may have started earlier than that.

I first went into therapy when I was 12 years old.  For being depressed and suicidal.  I was in therapy for the better part of a year.  Thirty years later, I can honestly say that it didn't work the way it was supposed to.  I was just as depressed, just as suicidal when I ended that year of therapy as when I started, if not worse.  And, for clarification, I meant school year when I said it lasted a year.  Pretty much the entirety of seventh grade.  I had trust issues with the therapist I was seeing and never felt hat he even gave a shit about me and what was going on in my heat.  Then again, I never felt that anyone gave a shit about me and what was going on in my head.  So I learned how to hide it, or so I believed.

Throughout junior high, my depression only deepened.  In ninth grade, I was put back into therapy with the same therapist.  I remember him putting me through a battery of psychological tests, including the MMPI.  I remember that the tests were supposed to take 3-4 hours.  I completed them in about half that time.  I was accused of not doing the tests correctly, and my high rate of reading wasn't taken into account.  I read every single question on every single test and answered honestly.  I was told that I wasn't suicidal or depressed, despite the fact that I truly was, and yet I was put into therapy for a few months.  In hindsight, all of that therapy really only resulted in a few things: a distrust of all therapists, a need to hide how I truly felt inside, and a huge waste of money for my parents.  Despite wanting someone to believe me and understand me, I never wanted to be in therapy.

It was my senior year of high school when I first attempted suicide.  I was 18 years old and things just finally came to ahead with regard to the things I was feeling and unable to quell.  It was a pathetic, pitiful attempt that resulted in a little quarter-inch scar on my left inner wrist.  No one knew  about that attempt until I confessed to the teacher who'd first suggested therapy for me back in seventh  grade.  I'd written her a letter, thanking her for seeing my initial cries for help, and I felt I needed to be honest with her about the attempt.  She gave me hell for making her cry during a final exam she was overseeing, also told me that she'd assumed I'd tried far further back in our association.

In high school, I knew a girl peripherally that killed herself.  The situation was terrifying and fascinating to me.  I was seeing firsthand what the fallout was for a successful suicide.  It humbled me, but it didn’t' stop the pain the loathing, the desire for an end to all of it.  And I still made that first attempt later that same school year.  I never said it was rational…

There were two more blatant attempts over the next two years with similar results.  That doesn't include the countless time I came so close over the years, starting when I was 12 years old, ending in my mid-thirties.

To this day, I've never understood why I chose the method I did.  I'd always thought that pills would be a better option. You know, the whole fantasy of falling asleep and dying in my sleep.  Such a romantic notion, and yet it scare the ever loving hell out of me.  So I chose razor blades -- actually pocket, disposable utility knives -- and my left inner wrist.  Far more painful, far more visceral, far more "real".  The pain was more akin to the pain and turmoil roiling inside of me.

I went  through cycles with my depression and suicidal ideation tendencies.  Intense emotions, good and bad both, tended to set me off.  So did extremes in weather.  I wondered for years if I was bipolar, based on the swings in mood.  I also wondered about Seasonal Affective Disorder, though I do think I have some level of this.  When I was nineteen and in college, I tried another therapist, who gave me a diagnosis of dysthymic disorder.  In other words, a long-term low-grade depression lasting two or more years.  By the time he gave me that diagnosis, I'd been depressed for nearly a decade, and suicidal for the vast majority of that.

But I had a diagnosis, and I clung to it like a life line.  For nearly twenty years, I clung to that diagnosis, but I never went to any further therapy.  I will be utterly honest and say that I am terrified, nearly to the point phobia, of therapy.  I have had to find other ways to deal with my depression and suicidal tendencies, not all of which have been successful, because of that awful near-phobia of therapy.

The mood swings, depression, and suicide ideation were joined by a long-simmering anger and ability to stew over things and hold massive grudges.  Oh, and let's not forget the crushing sense of worthlessness and uselessness.  It's a volatile, debilitating cocktail that swims in my veins.  It's caused more than its fair share of issues in my life and my relationships across the board.  Not many people have been willing to be on the receiving end of my freak out rampages over the years, and I don't blame them!  Whenever I have had one of those breakdowns -- because, let's be honest, that's what they were -- they've only made the depression and the suicidal ideation stronger.  I have hated myself for losing control, even as I let loose the screaming harpies in my head and in my soul.  I have felt so disgusted with myself for those gross overreactions that death seemed the best option for everyone involved, rather than dealing with my raging psychotic self.

After the breakup of each of my major romantic relationships, I became even more suicidal, despite all but one of them being abusive and co-dependent.  My first girlfriend was physically, verbally, and emotionally abusive. But I still stayed with her, did everything I could to keep her in my life, because I thought I deserved that.  I nearly killed myself after she left me, despite being terrified of her.  She fed into my self-worth issues, made me even more of a hit mess than I already was, and I still thought id' be better off dead without her.  It's been eighteen years and there are still days where I'd rather be dead than without her.  They're very infrequent, but they're still there.  My last ex was equally abusive in the verbal and emotional senses, but thankfully not physically so.  The co-dependency and passive-aggressiveness of my exes have been nothing but gasoline on the  fire of my issues.

My relationship with BD has supplied a few of its own spikes toward the suicidal tendencies over the years, particularly in the early years.  But my relationship with her has been the most beneficial over the years and the longest lasting.  Even with other romantic entanglements for both of us during the years, she has been my constant.

Over the years, there has always been some singularly important thing that has stayed the blade when I have been most suicidal.  First it was my paternal grandmother, then it was my brother after he was born, and now it's both BD and my nephew.  Those three "legitimate' attempts were so overwhelmingly painful to me because not even my baby brother, whom I adored more than life itself, could stop me from attempting to end my life.

This ended up wandering off in a slightly different vein than I'd intended, but I don't mind.  This is how I had to work through this.